Global Courant
PATNA, India – The dingy backstreets of Musallahpur, in the northern Indian city of Patna, teem with the foot traffic, banners and vending carts familiar to commercial hubs across India. Here, however, the cacophony is focused on one goal: helping young people find jobs in the government.
Musallahpur is packed with brick-shed classrooms where over-20s crowd and their heavy backpacks to train for standardized labor exams.
With nearly 1,800 applicants for each of the state’s top positions, they know it’s the ultimate contender. But in a country where the drudgery of semi-workers defines the lives of hundreds of millions, it’s their only hope.
A thousand miles south, in the city of Coimbatore, a busy auto parts entrepreneur, M. Ramesh, faces the downside of India’s major employment challenge. If the government has far more potential employees than it needs, then Ramesh has far too few.
To make complicated aluminum castings that perform precisely at 200 mph, he needs workers willing to stay, learn and earn. But he says he can’t find enough capable and reliable, from the poorer north of the country or anywhere else. So he was a week away from partially automating his factory and switched to machines in hopes of employing fewer people.
As India overtakes China to become the most populous nation in the world, resolving the economic imbalance is perhaps the most crucial task. Success could mean a more middle-income future that delivers on the country’s earth-shattering promise. Failure could trap large parts of India in pervasive poverty for decades to come.
The fate of the greatest generation of workers in the world is at stake.
India’s young and growing population, with more students dropping out of school each year to pursue careers, is the envy of countries facing an aging citizenry and a shrinking workforce. The economic growth of about 6 percent per year is also a global bright spot.
But that growth does not create enough jobs. And the jobs offered by companies often do not match the skills and aspirations of potential workers in India.
This has consequences for the whole world. India needs to get more out of its workforce if its economy, now the fifth largest and increasingly intertwined with the global exchange of goods and services every year, is to drive growth elsewhere, as China is doing.
Within India, the long-term consequences could be serious if suitable employment is not found for its young people. The unfulfilled desires of these workers, more educated and more in debt than ever, have become a fleeting force.
In the state of Bihar, of which Patna is the capital, young men set fire to trains last summer, furious at a plan to cut jobs in the armed forces.
A quieter risk is a huge waste of human resources. India’s expected “demographic dividend” as the population continues its steady but manageable growth could instead lead a huge cohort to settle for unfulfilled and unproductive work, if they don’t stop working completely.
At the same time, managers are struggling with huge staffing problems. It can be difficult to find people willing to uproot for the factory jobs most critical to long-term economic growth. Training them can be expensive and it can be nearly impossible to keep them.
If India followed a traditional development path, it would need a more robust manufacturing sector, economists say. But as bosses try to sidestep their labor woes by opting for automation, India is trending toward “premature deindustrialization,” with manufacturing jobs disappearing before they’ve worked their usual poverty-busting magic.
“We either need to move to full automation where we need to drastically reduce our manpower or look at doing business with fewer people,” said Mr. Jayakumar Ramdass, the joint managing director of Mahendra Pumps, another thriving industrial concern in Coimbatore.
